Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  Gisela Romer was thirty-one, an inch taller than Kelly, and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. At five-ten, that didn’t make her willowy by Western standards, but it was as exotic a touch as her blond hair in a Turkish culture where a beautiful woman five feet tall would weigh as much. The telecopied newspaper photograph appended to the file was indistinct enough to have been Jackie Kennedy, but the high, prominent cheekbones came through.

  As Elaine had said in the elevator, Gisela Romer was a Turkish citizen; but her father and mother were part of a sizable contingent of Germans who had surfaced in Turkey in the late forties, carrying South American and South African passports that might not have borne the most careful scrutiny. By that time, Berlin was under Soviet blockade and the Strategic Air Command was very interested in flight paths north from the Turkish bases they were constructing. Nobody was going to worry too much about, say, a Waffen-SS Oberfuehrer named Schneider who might now call himself Romer.

  Information on Gisela was sparse through the mid-sixties—no place of residence and no record of schooling, though her father was reaching a level of prominence as a power in what was variously called the Service League or simply the Service—der Dienst.

  “Is there an annex on the Dienst?” Kelly muttered when he got to the reference in Gisela Romer’s bio.

  “You’ve got the file,” Elaine noted simply. “I can give you a bare bones now if there isn’t. An import-export cooperative for certain expatriate families. Almost certainly drug involvement, probably arms as well in the other direction.”

  “There’s an annex,” Kelly said as he thumbed forward from the back of the clumsy document.

  The printout on the Dienst was obviously a synopsis. The organization had been penetrated decades before, possibly from the very date of its inception. The file was less circumspect than Elaine had been about drug and arms trafficking. CIA used the Dienst as one of the conduits by which it increased its unreported operating budget through worldwide drug dealing. Drugs were not, by the agency’s charter, its problem; and morality became a CIA problem only when one of its officers became moral and went public with the details of what he had been doing while on the agency payroll.

  Clients for the Dienst’s gunrunning were a more catholic gathering, though various facets of the US government were prominent among them. A brief notation brought to Kelly’s mind the shipment of automatic rifles with Columbian proof markings which he had issued to his Kurds. It was useful—generally—to carry out policy through channels which permitted bureaucrats to deny government involvement. The Dienst was indeed a service organization, and not merely on behalf of the war criminals it had smuggled out of Germany.

  “These guys are a bunch of Nazis,” Kelly said wonderingly as he tossed the annex on the desk and returned to the main file.

  “They appear to have no political ends, here or in Germany,” his case officer replied. “There is—and it may not be here”—she tapped the paper with an index finger—“an involvement in espionage, with us and probably with the Russians. Perhaps just another way of buying safety by becoming useful to both sides.”

  “Which is where,” Kelly said as he resumed reading, “Gisela Romer and her line of work come in, I presume.”

  Ahmed Ayyubi had called Romer “the blond whore,” but there was nothing to suggest that the statement was literally true. The woman had been dancing professionally since she was fourteen. Her background and appearance would have gained her a following in any Moslem country, but her skill level was apparently equal to that of any competitor in Turkey. At over a hundred thousand lire per performance, her legitimate earnings approximated those of an international soccer star.

  So the men she slept with were chosen for position rather than wealth: high police and military officials; bank presidents and airline officials, people who could facilitate movements of one sort or another; and members of the diplomatic community in both Istanbul and Ankara.

  “Why the hell would she pick up Mohammed Ayyubi?” Kelly demanded as he flapped down the last page of the printout. “He’s not in her league.” He laughed. “Figuratively, I mean. Literally, hell, maybe he was.”

  “Does it say that there?” Elaine asked, picking up the sheet Kelly had just finished.

  “Mohammed’s brother says it,” Kelly muttered, “more’r less. God, I’m tired. And what in blazes do either one of ‘em have to do with that—thing in the freezer.”

  “Ayyubi isn’t around to ask,” the woman said dryly. “But if you want to meet Gisela Romer, that can be arranged.”

  Kelly stood up and stretched. Elaine waited tensely for her agent’s face to take on an expression or for him to say something. The muscles of Kelly’s shoulders bunched beneath his jacket and his eyes gave her the feeling that she was being watched over a gunsight.

  “When. Where. How,” the veteran said at last. The syllables were without tone, not even of interrogation.

  “She’ll be performing at a Turkish-American Friendship Society meeting tomorrow night. The file indicates her technique.” Elaine fanned the sheaf of papers again. “If you attend with the US assistant military attaché here, she’ll be interested.”

  The woman paused. Kelly gestured with one hand, palm upward. “Drop the other shoe.”

  “If we drop word of who you really are,” Elaine continued calmly, “she’ll hit on you for sure to learn what you’re doing in Turkey again. And that could be the opening you need.”

  “Fucking brilliant,” Kelly snorted. “And who else picks me up? I’m a bit of a target, don’t you think, for what happened three years back?”

  “That’s not a problem with the Dienst,” the woman said. “Quite the contrary. Nor with the Turkish government, which keeps the Israelis in line; you’re not worth dynamiting the only diplomatic relations Israel has with an Islamic state. And we’ll keep the USG off your back, now and from now on.” She bent forward, though that meant she had to look up more steeply to meet the eyes of the standing man. “We’re already doing that, Tom. That’s the payment we’re giving you that you couldn’t buy with money.”

  “Convey my thanks to Pierrard and his budget officers,” Kelly said with an ironic bow. They’d sell him to Shin Bet or for cats’ meat—which might come to about the same thing—the moment it suited their purposes.

  “All right,” he continued, with a note of resignation, “she’s the best handle I see just now.” He held his fist out in front of him and stared at it as he raised his fingers one at a time. “I don’t see very much, that’s sure. What time’s the party?”

  “Seven-thirty,” Elaine said, relaxing minusculely. “It’s in the casino in the Hilton, five minutes walk, so that’s not a problem. Probably better to have Commander Posner call for you here, though, so you arrive together.”

  “All right,” said Kelly as he started for the door.

  “What will you do till then?”

  “Sleep,” said the agent. “And probably nothin’ else.”

  Which wasn’t very much of a lie.

  Kelly locked the door of 725 and turned on the shower.

  He was taking a chance by deciding to review the tape as soon as he got back to his room, because the system could not record additional material while he was listening to what it had collected to date. A second tape recorder would have permitted both . . . but additional gear meant a greater chance of discovery, and anyway—he was Tom Kelly, no longer NSA, and there was only one of him.

  So although there was a fair likelihood that Elaine was about to have a conversation Kelly would like to know about, he opened the false battery pack attachéd to the Sony and rewound the miniature metal tape. The shower was not to cover the sound of the tape—it played back through earphones attachéd to the radio—but rather as an explanation, if anyone were listening to the noises within his darkened room and wondering at the fact that he was not asleep.

  The taping system worked. You never knew, when components had to be arranged separately and not tested unt
il they were in place. And this installation had been trickier than most because the cavity resonator Kelly had planted in his case officer’s room was nothing but a closed metal tube with a short antenna attachéd. One end of the tube was a thin diaphragm which vibrated with the speech of people in the room. There was no internal power source, no circuitry, nothing but the section of wave guide. The microwaves directed at it from the ETAP were modulated by the diaphragm, and the whole was rebroadcast on the FM band at a frequency determined by the resonance of the microwave signal, the wave guide, and the length of the antenna.

  The recorder was voice-activated so the first syllable of any string was clipped, and there was the usual urban trash overlaying a weak signal. Kelly had been trained to gather content from as little as thirty percent of a vocal message, however, and he had no problem following the recording.

  The first of it was the phone ringing followed by Elaine’s voice, noncommittal but recognizable, saying, “All right, good. Stay down there.” George reporting from the coffee shop that Kelly had returned to the Sheraton. That, and Kelly’s own discussion with Elaine in her room, were of interest purely as a test of the system.

  The next conversation was the case officer’s side of an outbound telephone call which had to have been made while Kelly showered before they went out to dinner.

  Click. “All right, he’s eye-deed Gisela Romer and wants her file. We’re going out to dinner, so have it waiting. I don’t think it’ll surprise him. He expects us to be efficient, and there isn’t much time to fuck around.”

  Click. “He says he was getting laid. . . . Maybe, maybe. I can’t tell with him, he’s spooky. . . . What—?”

  Click. “No, for God’s sake run off a fresh copy. How are we going to explain photocopies of a dog-eared original? . . . I don’t— . . . God damn it, Doug, get somebody there who can run the printer, even if it means dragging the Consul out of bed.

  Click. “All right. Oh—and tell Romer we’ll try to have Kelly at the dinner tomorrow night. She’s to make contact with him there.”

  Click. “She’s not paid to like it, she’s paid to take orders. We’ve got to have a check on what Kelly’s doing, and if it works out—he’s perverse enough that he’s just apt to trust her. At any rate, they can talk politics without getting into arguments. . . . Right.”

  The clunk of the handset returning to its cradle ended the conversation. There were several identifiable sounds—door opening and closing, someone muttering unintelligibly—probably Doug entering with the requested files. The discussion, the three of them and then the occasional muttered comments of Kelly and the woman as he read and she pretended to read the flimsies. Compression of the silences made the tape jar against Kelly’s memory, but there was nothing really different about the conversation.

  All but the auditory center of his brain was concerned with what he had just heard, anyway.

  It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d feared; they weren’t setting him up for a long drop, not yet anyway. But they wanted to make sure they had him on a leash, even if that meant identifying him to a gang of Nazi criminals without his say-so.

  . . . they can talk politics without getting into arguments. Christ! didn’t anybody realize that ideology, religious or political, didn’t matter a damn to Tom Kelly? The only things worth killing for—or dying for—were personal . . . and if Kelly had personally kicked the whole state of Israel in the balls, that didn’t make him a Nazi. Given cause and opportunity, he would have done the same to Britain or any political group in the US of A.

  And the other thing they didn’t seem to realize is that you don’t own ideologues just because they take your money. Intelligence operatives, effective ones, cannot make decisions on political bases any more than they can for personal reasons. They tend, as a result, to devalue both. Perhaps Gisela Romer was simply venal, in which case she would take anyone else’s money as quickly as she did Pierrard’s. The personality Kelly had gleaned from the file, however, was that of a woman who would take US money for the same reason that she gave head to the KGB resident in Istanbul: the Dienst, the Service, required it.

  In neither case was she going to jump through a hoop simply because Elaine Tuttle told her to.

  Kelly sighed. The tape wound through several seconds of silence after recording the door closing as he left 727 for his own room. He reached for the Rewind switch, planning to reset the unit to record. A clear voice where there should have been only blank tape said, “Mr. Kelly, we must speak with you. You need fear no harm. We need you to save yourselves.”

  There was no click or other recording artifact before or after the voice. Its volume level was higher than that of the recording previously, and there was no background of white noise as had clung to the sounds broadcast by the cavity resonator.

  Kelly backed the tape and listened again. The end of his conversation with Elaine, the door closing, and nothing. Nothing again.

  The voice he had heard was gone, except for what now stuck in his mind like a drug-induced nightmare.

  He rerigged the camouflaged recorder by rote. Kelly’s hands could do that or strip a firearm with almost no support from his conscious mind; and just now, there was very little support available in that quarter. As he let himself down on the bed, he remembered the shower was running. It took an effort of will to get him to his feet again to turn off the tap, and that only because he had spent too long in arid landscapes to let water waste itself down the sewers now.

  Short men in dark overcoats lurked at the corners of his eyes as he moved, but there was no one with him in the room and no light to have seen them by in any case.

  Kelly dreamed while he slept, and his body flushed itself of the residues of tension and fatigue. There were no creatures with multijointed limbs, only men in tunics building and battling over a city on a river. Other rivers might have the sharp bank the swift-moving Tigris had cut through the soil of Mesopotamia, but there could be no doubt about the black basalt fortification: he was dreaming of Diyarbakir, or rather, of Amida—the city’s name when it was part of the Roman and Byzantine Empires.

  The wails rose and were ringed by Persian armies in glittering armor, a dream montage drawn from guidebook scraps Kelly had assimilated out of curiosity when he trained guerrillas nearby . . . but more than that as well, banners and equipment that he did not know, that very likely nobody knew at this distance from the event.

  The besiegers raised a mound of earth and fascines, stripping the countryside of timber for miles. “No . . .” Kelly muttered in his sleep, because he knew what came next, and he had himself soldiered through in the wreck of other people’s disastrously bad ideas. The wall of Amida rose regardless, propped and piled and jury-rigged to overmatch the encircling threat.

  It was not a normal dream. It had the cohesiveness and inevitability not of nightmare, where fear makes its own reality for the duration of sleep, but rather of history. Kelly was an observer, and the frustration of watching rather than participating—even in a certain disaster—caused him to drench with sweat the bedspread on which he lay.

  And the wall of Amida, thrown higher than reason to make the fortress impregnable, crashed of its own weight toward the Persian lines. The rubble of it lay in a broad entrance ramp, giving the besiegers a gentle slope up which they scrambled into the heart of the city, crying slaughter and the glory of their bloody monarch Shapur.

  Kelly thought he would prefer anything to the rape and butchery his mind showed him in the same omniscient detail as it had the preliminaries. But what closed the dream at last was a nuclear fireball, expanding and devouring its way across not Amida but a thousand modern cities, each of them as clear in Kelly’s brain as the screams of the first woman he had shot at close range.

  He awoke standing, legs splayed and the snubbie in his right hand searching for a target in the dim light. He thought it must be dawn, but the digital clock in his little radio said that it was seven pm.

  There was no one else in the room.
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  Kelly felt foolish as he put the revolver down, but coming alert with a gun ready had been a survival reflex for a lot of years. Hell, it probably was again. And if nothing was waiting for him in the room at the moment, then that certainly didn’t mean that everything was normal.

  He’d never had a dream like that in his life; and it seemed likely enough that whatever it was he’d just—imagined—it wasn’t a dream.

  The phone rang. Kelly jumped, cursed, and started to pick up the handset. His right palm and fingers tingled oddly, and not from his grip on the snubbie, that was too familiar a stress for him to notice its effect. Flexing his right hand, Kelly picked up the phone with his left and said, “Shoot.”

  “Thought I’d check in, Tom,” Elaine said through a buzz of static more reasonable for a call from Lagos than from the next room over. “Commander Posner expects to meet you in the lobby in twenty minutes.”

  “No problem,” said Kelly. “I was just getting dressed.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to it. Good luck,” the woman said and rang off.

  She sounded cheerful enough, Kelly thought. Wonder if she’d be cheerful if she knew as much about the bug as the bug had told Kelly about her.

  He should have been wrung out by the nightmare, but in fact he’d awakened feeling as good as he had in years. The length of time he’d slept didn’t make sense, either. He’d needed eighteen hours of rest, but there was no way his mind should have let him get it. It didn’t work that way when you were on edge. Catnaps maybe, but not uninterrupted sleep that genuinely refreshed you instead of just backing a notch or two off your tension.

  The tingling in his right hand persisted for some minutes, finally wearing away at about the time he shrugged into the coat of his gray wool suit. It hadn’t been anything serious, nothing that kept him from tying his shoes or would have kept him from putting all five rounds from the snubbie into a shirt pocket at fifteen yards.